‘Again, thank you. But much as I appreciate your appreciation, I need more than that before I let you go after my package.’
In Ireland, going after a guy’s package means grabbing him by the balls. I think Faber is talking about his drugs again.
‘You read my file?’
‘No. Any good bits?’
‘I have a special skill set.’
‘Any of those skills relevant?’
‘Shit, Faber, if your package was in Fallujah I could extract it.’
Faber licked his lips. Extract. He liked that bit of military.
‘It begins with an F, but it ain’t Fallujah.’
Ten minutes later, Faber had Deacon’s computer on his knee and was scrolling my file.
‘Kee-rist almighty, Daniel. This reads good. You kill anyone over there?’
‘Only the ones that died. What’s in this for me, Faber? If I’m gonna be a criminal, I might as well get paid.’
I figured if anyone could understand greed, it would be a lawyer.
‘You get my package and I’ll give you fifty grand plus your life back.’
He was lying and we both knew it; what we didn’t know was if the other person knew we knew it.
What are you, six?
‘Okay, Faber. You got a deal. Cut me loose and give me the details.’
Faber called one of his boys over, gave him a set of keys and a few whispered instructions.
‘Not just yet, Daniel. I need to make an impression on you first. Show you what a dead serious kinda guy I am. One more taste of electromuscular disruption should do it.’
The house I’m watching is straight out of the opening credits of a suburban sitcom. According to what TV tells us, there should be an overweight dad, a foxy mom, couple of smartarse kids and maybe an in-law down the basement. Work in a couple of catchphrases, like sheesh, Ma or none of you people get me and next thing you know it’s season nine and DVD box sets are topping the charts.
This is the last place you’d expect to find a steroid lab. Nevertheless, according to Faber, this is exactly where I will find one.
‘And a lotta security,’ he said. ‘State of the art. These guys don’t skimp.’
Faber is not risking any of his guys on this run, so I’m on my own. No fake police backup. A pity, as according to Faber, Goran had put together quite the strike force. Pro-bars, oneman battering rams, the whole kit and caboodle.
‘Think of it as a test, Daniel. You bring home the goods and maybe next time I let you take out some of the boys.’
I should call the FBI, that’s what I should do. But once the Feds become involved, the best-case scenario is I live out my days in witness protection; the worst-case is Deacon freezes and I get life without parole. So maybe I put Newark on speed dial, but I don’t push the button just yet.
Newark on speed dial? Your thoughts are beginning to sound American.
Zeb is right. I’ve been here too long. I need a pint of Guinness that’s taken five minutes to pour, and a date with a freckled redhead.
The house looks normal, but I squint into the shadows and see camera domes suckered to the eaves. Laser eyes too, on stalks in the garden. The windows are small, with decorative cast-iron bars, and the door is painted to look wooden, but I’m betting on steel. Spotlights on the lawn and roof complete the package. This place is a subtle fortress. There’s no chance I’m fighting my way inside.
I circle around back, which is not as easy as it sounds. In modern America’s paranoid suburbia, the tendency is to shoot strangers first and ask questions later, if at all. There are stories on the news every day about garbage men getting plugged by panicked housewives just because they were speaking in some language that was not English. Sometimes that’s their actual court defence.
He was round back of my house, messing with my trash, speaking terrorist talk. What does he ’spect?
But I politicise.
Luckily, shadows are lengthening, I’m wearing black and I have done this kind of thing before. I nip through the adjoining yard, all ready to lay someone out if I have to. I’m hoping for a male. I could live with socking some stocky gardener, but a slip of a girl might be more than my beleaguered psyche will allow.
Pull yourself together or you’ll start making mistakes.
Yeah. That’s rich coming from a guy who once tossed back three shots of furniture polish after the club one night. Three shots before he noticed something wrong.
First decent crap I took in months, says Ghost Zeb.
I make it around back through a bricked alley without having to relieve anyone of their senses, and conceal myself in a cluster of evergreens. I peep through branches to the bay window and see the empty lounge of an affluent suburban home with regulation Eames recliner that is too expensive for the kids to ever sit in. Nice garden, though, I gotta say. Plenty of green, nice wild feel to it without being neglected. Reminds me of . . .
Oh, please. Shut the hell up.
Okay, then.
I hear a sudden growling and I realise that there’s a dog in the trees with me. Big bastard too, I’m guessing, by the way his breath is in my ear. These are his trees and he’s pissed. I have maybe two seconds before he clamps his teeth around my face. Faber will notice a hell of a spike in my vitals then.
Please not a Rottweiler. Please not a Rottweiler.
I look and there’s a Rottweiler two feet away from me, his sharp head comically bewigged by soft green ferns. He’s got his lips pulled back over his incisors and his black eyeballs are on me like target lasers, which kinda takes the comic out of it.
Christ. This is not right. How much more shit can be piled on one person in a day?
The dog lunges and I roll back into the tree roots and shrubs with him, clamping his snout with one hand. I get a fistful of dog snot, but at least those teeth are contained for the moment. I reach down with the other hand and grab the dog’s crotch.
Congratulations. It’s a boy.
Screw squeamishness. In the words of David Byrne: I ain’t got time for that now.
The dog is in my arms and he’s wriggling like a sea creature out of water. I can feel the animal’s fury testing my muscles to their limits. Branches snap around our heads, and with the dusk falling it’s like a scene from a horror movie. I half expect some masked creep to emerge from the alley with a mommy fixation and a carving knife.
I give the Rottweiler’s balls a squeeze to get him good and angry, then use every pound of strength I can muster to flip him over the garden fence. I hear the thump and scrabble as he lands awkwardly next door then finds his paws. This is not a move I had ever planned or run through in any of my justin-case scenarios; it’s kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing and could even work to my advantage.
Go, Bonzo, I broadcast at the dog. Give ’em hell.
Next door the commotion is immediate. Bonzo rampages through the drug den’s back garden looking for some throats to tear out. I’m betting this particular dog is not used to being manhandled over a fence. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but I would argue that a scorned woman would pale and back out of the room faced with a Rottweiler who just got his scrotum twisted.
I peep over the fence. Next door’s garden has roughly the same dimensions: a rectangular lawn maybe twenty by thirty, with various immature trees clustered at the end. It also has a freshly laid rear driveway with a pick-up reversed up to a back door, which is obviously reinforced.
There’s a guy on the door who doesn’t know whether to give Bonzo his tough-guy face or shit his pants.
I may not be able to get myself into this house, but maybe I can make whoever is in there come out to me.
The dog shakes his sleek head like he’s disembowelling an imaginary rabbit, then spots the guy at the door and decides to transfer my crimes to him. His growl says, I am going to eat you alive, motherfucking ball-squeezer.
There isn’t a man on this planet who isn’t scared by a Rottweiler coming at him with drool streaming out of his mouth.
I squat to rummage through the bag at my feet. First I pop a couple of earplugs from their plastic envelope, then I select a Steyer Bullpup assault rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher slung underneath the barrel. And to think I almost didn’t go for the launcher option, but the dealer sold me on it. Hey, don’t take the launcher model, what do I care, but for a hundred bucks I can throw in two grenades. A hundred bucks! You telling me, Irish, that you can’t think of a single situation where a couple of grenades wouldn’t come in handy?
I could think of a couple of situations. This wasn’t one of them. Flying dogs and grenades in the suburbs.
I stick my head over the fence and peer through the branches just in time to lip-read the doorman’s fuck this and see him hurry in the back door. He slams it half a second too late to stop the Rottweiler making it inside.
That is a lucky bonus. I was hoping for the dog outside at the door, causing a distraction, but inside the house itself . . . Should be carnage. Hopefully.
Seconds later the consternation starts. Crashing, tinkling, shouts of surprise. A couple of gunshots.
They’re thinking, What the hell is going on? Where is this coming from?
Pack up the shit. Pack it up.
First rule of any factory: protect the product.
I pull the assault rifle into my shoulder and flick off the safety, and instantly I am a soldier again. It’s the click. Once the safety is off, it is no longer a drill.
I strafe the roof, knocking holes in the slates, leaving beams exposed and severing the power lines. If those guys don’t have a generator in there, surveillance is down. Even if they do, I have a minute.
Now they’re thinking, Gunfire. It’s a raid. We need to move out.
Gunfire is one thing, but explosions really light a fire under people. I feed a grenade into the launcher, close the slide and pull the secondary trigger, sending a silver 40mm egg of explosives through a hole in the roof. I hope no one was hiding their Christmas presents up there.
The explosion is not Hollywood big but it’s enough to reduce the attic space to so much firewood. The sound wave makes reality jump a frame or two, and a cloud of smoke and dust hang over the house, a marker for the fire brigade.
That’s all the destruction I need. I stuff the assault rifle back into my magic bag and drop over the fence into enemy territory. Maybe their cameras are out, maybe not. Either way, I have to act.
The pick-up crouches in the driveway like a wild beast. A brand-new Hilux with outsize wheels and probably a lot more than shop horsepower waiting under the hood. This is the getaway vehicle, no doubt about it. Any aggravation comes in the front door, and the steroids go out the back in this beauty.
A guy comes on to the patio, gun in one hand and keys in the other. There’s a stripe of blood across his arm and I’m thinking good boy, Bonzo. And also rest in peace, doggie. I twist the wing mirror so I can follow what’s happening, then squat behind the Hilux’s grille, and give the situation a few seconds to develop. Maybe this guy has the steroids on him.
Or maybe not. A second man wheels out two large sealed plastic barrels on a drum caddy. This guy is limping from a leg bite and I’m starting to feel sad for Bonzo.
The men load both barrels into the flatbed, grunting and cursing.
‘Get the last barrel,’ the first man shouts over the crackling flames billowing from the attic.
‘Fuck that,’ says junior guy. ‘I ain’t going back in there.’
Guy 1 brandishes his weapon in a way that tells me he doesn’t have a whole lot of gun-time.
‘Okay,’ says junior guy hurriedly. ‘Jesus, Bobby. We just split a tuna melt.’
‘It was a nice sandwich, man, and we’ll always have that. But I’m the supervisor and I gotta put the tuna aside. So just get the barrel, E Bomb. Shit.’
E Bomb tiptoes back into the house in a way that makes me think that Bonzo is still alive.
E Bomb? Christ, what have nicknames come to? The problem is that these guys are inventing their own names. No one christens themselves Four-eyes, or Shit-breath. One guy back in Dublin, did six months for peeping Tom offences, guys called him Windows 2000. Now that’s a nickname.
Even though the house is under attack, this guy is so focused on making sure there isn’t a dog clamped to his arse that he never sees me coming. I sneak around the driver’s side, punch him in the temple. Hard. And catch his keys before they hit the ground. I don’t even need to take my slim jim out of the bag.
Thanks, Bobby.
Bobby bounces off the door, belches, then collapses to the drive. I smell tuna. I am amazed when he shakes his head and gets in a swing at me. A good one that connects with my entire face. I am going to be lit up like a pumpkin in the morning. I am so pissed that I smack Bobby’s head against the fender maybe a little harder than I need to.
I beep the pick-up with a Toyota fob and jump inside, slinging my bag of tricks into the passenger seat.
That punch hurt my knuckles. Maybe cracked one.
Could be arthritis, says Ghost Zeb, rifling my repressed memories. Your father suffered from it. One of the reasons he drank.
So he said. Didn’t stop him beating on us.
The pick-up starts on the first turn of the key. I should bloody think so, all the money those steroid manufacturers spent on it. I yank the gear lever and floor the gas. The only thing between me and the open road is a key-coded gate that looks like it has enough square bars to contain even the Hilux.
Which is why I veer left and go through the flimsy wooden fence. Morons. I mean really, what kind of a tool organised their security? It only took one man and a mutt to reduce it to smithereens.
The last thing I see of the steroid house in my rear-view mirror is Bonzo, loping out of the back door with a hank of something in his jaws. Good dog, I think. Good dog.
CHAPTER 10
I try to stay focused on the drive back to Jersey, but the smooth ride is comforting and my mind begins to wander.
I keep saying that I’m not big on flashbacks, but whenever my mind blurs, the Lebanon is always there. Sky filled with streaking rockets, mangled shards of metal constantly raining from above. Everything was pockmarked by shrapnel. Everything. Mahogany-skinned old men on their stoops shooting the breeze like it was same-old same-old. Which it probably was.
I remember one French guy whose claim to fame was a dick the size of a baguette. This boast was put to the test one day when we came across a dog fight arena and . . .
Macey Barrett’s phone rings and I nearly jump out of my skin when the car automatically picks up its Bluetooth signal and transfers the call to the Toyota’s sound system.
‘Daniel?’
‘Holy Mary!’ I blurt, which is a pretty accurate impersonation of a Christian Brother I used to do back in the eighties. Still pops out every now and then in times of stress.
Faber’s laughter is distorted by the speaker. ‘For you, I’m Holy Mary, God, Jesus and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one.’
I recover myself a little. ‘Faber. How’s it hanging, Jaryd? Good day in court pointing the shit out of everything?’
Faber’s not laughing now. ‘I point for emphasis, that’s all.’
‘You point all the bloody time. It doesn’t mean anything you do it so much. It’s like a tic. I’m telling you, Faber, that’s why you never win anything at the tables.’
Silence for a moment. All I can hear is the discreet growl of the engine and the asphalt joins bumping under the wheels.
The heartbeat of the road.
Faber gets over his pointing sulk. ‘Have you got the product?’
‘Two barrels of it. I hope you have secure storage.’
‘Two fucking barrels? Where am I going to put two barrels?’
‘Hey. I can dump one, no problem.’
‘No. I can store it. I wasn’t expecting two barrels. A briefcase maybe.’
‘This is steroids, Faber, not heroin. There must be half a million doses here.’
Faber whistles. ‘Those steroid guys really work for their money. The mark-up would make a crack dealer piss himself laughing.’
‘Faber, this wouldn’t be you trying to weasel out of giving me my fifty large? Because if that’s the case I can drive this truck to any one of a dozen people I know.’
‘That would be a bad idea, Daniel.’
‘Tell me why, arsehole.’
So he tells me. ‘Because your buddy Deacon, she’s already gone in the freezer.’
My stomach sinks.
‘Okay, dickhead. You watch your little screen and you’ll see me coming.’
‘I better see you coming fast. It’s cold in that freezer.’
I hate this guy and I wish he was dead.
Faber’s playing it cool, but he must be sweating over his decision to send me for the steroids. Even with a monitor on my ankle I’m a wild card and he knows it. Greed made him hasty and now he’s had an entire day to think about the possible consequences. I bet that pointing monkey just cannot wait to roll me into the freezer beside Ronelle, and start peddling his steroids outside health clubs all over New Jersey.
I drive slow, keeping to the speed limit, with the radio tuned to local travel news, in case there’s a pile-up on the motorway I need to avoid. Accidents mean blues, and this pick-up screams drug money.
Traffic is light and there’s a sweeping mist scything past the streetlight beams. All those little drops, like half a million twinkling steroid pills.
I drive on without seeing a single cruiser, in spite of our mayor’s road-safety drive, and in a couple of hours I’m back on good old I-95, cruising past monolithic Borders and Pottery Barns, past giant empty parking lots and all-night diners. I am envious of the people inside in their cocoon of light, enjoying the simple pleasure of some late eggs or a coffee refill. Not that I’m hungry yet, with the congealed lump of Mexican takeaway melting slowly in my stomach acid.
Christ. When you’re inside a diner you wanna be outside and when you’re outside you wanna get back in. What are you, schizo?
I’m talking to you, aren’t I?
By three thirty I’m bumping my tyres down the Cloisters off ramp and swinging a wide arc into the bus station car park. I have to look hard to find a young hood selling pot. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think this sleepy town had no hostess-killing lawyers living in it. I cut across empty spaces in the car park and pull in behind the dumpsters, beside a certain white Lexus that I had hoped never to see again.